Lamps With Colour Changed By Signal Get Dimmer; Colour Changed By Colour Picker Don't
Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2026 9:06 am
TL;DR
If you set a lamp to change its colour based on which colour signal it receives, the radius which it illuminates is reduced. But if you pick a colour using the colour picker, this doesn't happen.What?
Lamps set to take their colour from the circuit network using the old colour-signal system have their illumination radius greatly reduced. Presumably this was based on the assumption that non-white lamps are being used as signal lamps, rather than to actually see at night.These days, however, you can change the colour of a lamp permanently using the colour picker. This is very convenient, since it means that for signal lamps that turn on and off (rather than actually change colour) it is no longer necessary to hook them up to a constant combinator just to set them to tha appropriate colour - red for problems, green for things that are working, etc.. However, lamps with a colour set this way do not have a reduced illumination radius. Status displays made this way look very weird, with multiple overlapping coloured illumination patches!
(There's also the new way of setting colour by sending separate RGB values. I'm not sure, but I think this method of changing the colour also does not reduce the illumination radius.)
There are a few potential fixes here:
- Make the colour picker reduce the illumination radius too
- Tie the reduced illumination radius to the 'enable condition' circuit logic toggle instead, on the assumption that any lamp controlled that way, coloured or not, is being used as a status indicator. (For status indicators that just change colour without ever turning off, they can just set an enable condition that is always true, e.g. '[iron plate] == [iron plate]'.)
- Disconnect the illumination radius from the circuit conditions entirely and just have a separate toggle that switches a given lamp from bright to dim. Note that the default value of this toggle should be the same as the old system, to avoid breaking existing designs.